Supporters of Donald Trump were violently attacked at a rally last week in San Jose, Calif., and Hillary Clinton is blaming . . . Trump. From CNN:

“I condemn all violence in our political arena. I condemned it when Donald Trump was inciting it and congratulating people who were engaging in it,” [Mrs.] Clinton said after a campaign event in Culver City, California.

But [Mrs.] Clinton said Trump has “set a very bad example.”

“He created an environment in which it seemed to be acceptable for someone running for president to be inciting violence, to be encouraging his supporters, now we’re seeing people who are against him responding in kind,” [Mrs.] Clinton said. “It should all stop. It is not acceptable.”

Trump deserves some criticism on this score, and has received it from this column. But the moral equivalence Mrs. Clinton draws is outrageous and illiberal. For one thing, although Trump is culpable for having escalated conflicts at his past rallies, he did not initiate them. That was done by opponents who attended the rallies for the purpose of disrupting them.

More important, although Trump was wrong to encourage his supporters to turn on the disruptors in the first place, he abandoned that tactic after its dire consequences became clear. For the past three months or so, all the escalation has come from the anti-Trump “protesters,” as the media insist on euphemistically describing them.

HotAir’s Larry O’Connor has a roundup of reports on and images of last week’s violence, which he aptly describes as follows: “Anti-free speech thugs physically assaulted American citizens engaged in a peaceful, political assembly Thursday night outside a Donald Trump for President rally in San Jose.”

Before physically attacking Trump supporters, the protesters chanted “Make America Mexico again.” One held a handwritten sign reading “Trump, This is Mexico! You are not welcome on Native/Mexican Soil.” (San Jose is in Northern California, some 475 miles by car from the Mexican border.)

Under the benign headline “Protesters Take to Streets After Trump Rally in San Jose,” CNN reported: “Protesters [sic] jumped on cars, pelted Trump supporters with eggs and water balloons, snatched signs, and stole ‘Make America Great’ hats off supporters’ heads before burning them and snapping selfies with the charred remains.” They also burned American flags—which is protected symbolic speech, as per Texas v. Johnson (1989), and which also tells you something about what these “protesters” stand for.

“Our police officers have done an extremely courageous and professional job so far,” San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo told the Associated Press by phone. “We’re all still holding our breath to see the outcome of this dangerous and explosive situation.”

The mayor, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, criticized Trump for coming to cities and igniting problems that local police departments have to deal with.

“At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” Liccardo said.

But as San Jose Inside reports, San Jose’s finest acknowledged that they held back from taking decisive action against the attackers. The police department said in a statement:

While several physical assaults did occur, the police personnel on scene had the difficult task of weighing the need to immediately apprehend the suspect(s) against the possibility that police action involving the use of physical force under the circumstances would further insight [sic] the crowd and produce more violent behavior.

Critics on both left and right have bandied about the word “authoritarian” to describe Trump’s political style. This incident demonstrates that liberal democracy depends on legitimate authority. The constitutional right to peaceable assembly is an empty promise if police are unable or unwilling to protect peaceable citizens from violent thugs. In San Jose, the police failed.

The mayor’s comment gives reason to think the cause of that failure was political favoritism. (Would the police have held back if right-wing extremists physically attacked attendees leaving a rally for Mrs. Clinton?) That makes it an example of the crisis of authority this column identified in 2013, as the scandal of the Internal Revenue Service’s effort to suppress conservative speech was unfolding.

It is a commonplace, and a plausible one, that violence against Trump supporters only helps Trump’s cause. So why the equivocal response from liberals in positions of authority? In part it is a defensive reaction: The mayor, like Mrs. Clinton, hopes to minimize the political damage by deflecting blame to Trump. But it also appears that left-wing liberals are sympathetic to the far left. Consider this passage from an essay by Slate’s Jamelle Bouie:

To attack someone because of their [sic] political beliefs is to embrace the logic of authoritarianism. To cite intentions and not actions as justification for violence is to embrace the logic of even worse beliefs and actors. We have to get them before we get us isn’t “direct action”; it’s mobocracy. And it runs counter to the liberal democratic ideal—the thing we’re defending in the first place.

All true, except that last bit. Even putting the violence aside, what makes Bouie think that people who burn the flag and chant “Make America Mexico again” have any interest in defending the liberal democratic ideal?

Likewise, consider the confusion over at the liberal young-adult website Vox. As Mediaite reports, early Friday morning a Vox editor, Emmett Rensin, posted a series of pro-riot tweets including “Advice: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot” and “Let’s be clear: It’s never a shame to storm the barricades set up around a fascist.”

In the afternoon editor Ezra Klein announced that Rensin had been suspended because his tweets “violate Vox’s standards,” to wit: “Direct encouragement of riots crosses a line between expressing a contrary opinion and directly encouraging dangerous, illegal activity.”

But as blogger Tom Maguire notes, at the same time Vox was publishing this rationalization for violence, from Dara Lind:

A lot of political commentators recognize that Donald Trump poses a categorical threat to established norms of American democracy, governance, and society. They believe that he represents (whether intentionally or not) an ideology that is hostile to groups of nonwhite Americans.

In other words, they believe there are Americans to whom Trump poses an existential threat.

You don’t have to agree with protesters beating up Trump supporters, or even sympathize with them, to understand this. There are people who feel Trump’s rise puts their lives in danger. And many people make decisions about what actions are “appropriate” differently when they feel personally under threat.

It may be that Mayor Liccardo and Mrs. Clinton know their voters—and believe with reason that a substantial portion of them do sympathize with violent extremists. Politicians in that situation would put their electoral prospects at risk were they to take an unequivocal stand in favor of liberal democratic values. Blaming Trump is a politically expedient response, but one that damages American democracy and undermines the legitimate authority on which it depends.

Two Papers in One!

“TORONTO—Her face framed by a yellow hijab, Idil Hassan watched her young daughter splash with other children at the Regent Park Aquatic Center. . . . On Saturday evenings, mechanized screens shroud the center’s expansive glass walls to create a session that allows only women and girls to relax in the hot tub, swim laps or careen down the water slide, a rare bit of ‘me’ time treasured by many of the neighborhood’s Muslim residents. ‘I wouldn’t come before because my religion doesn’t allow women to be seen uncovered by men,’ said Ms. Hassan, a Somali immigrant. ‘It’s really helpful to have that day to be ourselves. I even learned to swim.’ ””—news story, New York Times, Feb. 29

“Four times a week this summer . . . a public swimming pool on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn will be temporarily unmoored [sic] from the laws of New York City and the Constitution, and commonly held principles of fairness and equal access. The pool will instead answer to the religious convictions of one neighborhood group. At those hours, women (and girls, too, on Sundays) will have the pool to themselves. Men and boys will not be permitted. Orthodox Jewish beliefs demand modesty in dress, and a strict separation of the sexes, and those are the beliefs to which the taxpayer-owned-and-operated Metropolitan Recreation Center will yield.”—editorial, New York Times, June 1

Diagram This Sentence “All that said, any reader of mine who is tempted to react to violence by a tiny subset of Trump opponents by supporting the candidate himself should understand that not only have Trump supporters engaged in violence on multiple occasions—two beat and urinated on a homeless man while saying ‘Trump was right’—the candidate himself has, on other occasions, explicitly encouraged violence, unlike Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or any other credible candidate for the presidency in my lifetime.”—Conor Friedersdorf, TheAtlantic.com, June 3

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate “An earlier version of a graphic with this article misstated the publication date of when Cassius Clay won an Olympic gold medal. It was Sept. 7 1960, not 1920.”—New York Times, June 4

You Really Don’t Like Her Maureen Dowd reports from Los Angeles on the campaign of the “plodding” inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton:

“Over the past months, I have heard the word likability used so frequently,” [actress] Sally Field said Friday at a Hillary rally here at a community college. “How Hillary Clinton is not likable. How she’s cold or shrill or an opportunist or just not someone you’d like to have a beer with. What is this? A high school popularity contest?”